Who this is for

If you use platforms controlled by corporations or governments, you are at risk. For example, if your main email address is something like yourname@big_ad_tech_company.com and someone takes it over, the platform cancels it, or they do some other nasty things, how inconvenient would that be for you? This guide shows you how to prevent any such inconvenience and give you maximum freedom.

What Happens on Platforms

Platforms have a life cycle where they start off being very attractive and welcoming to people. After they have captured a critical mass and attain network effects, they start extracting value from these people to their real customers who are advertisers, data brokers, and governments. In the final stage, they also extract value from their customers. This is called enshitification.

You may not have experienced this yet, but many people have learned the hard way that corporate run platforms put profits before people and do what the government tells them. These platforms regularly ban or cancel accounts, discontinue services, raise fees, change the terms of service, censor speech, feed it to AI, or start filling the sites with hostile advertising and tracking. Governments also compel these companies to do things not in your interest. You usually have little to no recourse. It is unwise to become too dependent or hostage to these platforms. If your business is based on a platform, you are at greater risk.

If you are using any of the platforms such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft etc., ask yourself "What if they closed my account, and I lost all access?" If you would lose important connections or services you need, you are probably hostage. Hostages get abused because they are not free to push back.

Solution

This guide will show you how to mitigate this problem and put you more in control. You can then more safely use government/corporate platforms when needed. By owning a domain you control, people can find you where you want them to find you. If you must leave a platform by choice or by force, it is not such a big deal since people can easily know where to find you. You can also expand your own web site in any way you want.

This gives you the flexibility to leave a platform, adopt a new platform, create your own site, change your communication channels, and more.

This does not solve the problem with platforms. The solution to that is leaving platforms altogether and moving to decentralized instances connected by common protocols like we have here on Ravergram.club. 

Step 1: Register your own domain

Buy your own domain such as yourname.com at a domain registrar. Technically you are renting the rights to use the domain, but as long as you keep paying the generally low yearly fee, you have control of your digital identity.

Gandi.net is a good registrar that also provides email and other services. Many other registrars such as https://www.hover.com/, https://porkbun.com, and https://www.namecheap.com/ are available if you prefer.

Step 2: Create your page or full website

You can refer your domain to any site through your domain registrar. This site can have links to all the places where people can find you such as Linkedin, the fediverse and so forth. Here are a few options:

• Create a Linkstack page with all your links on one of these instances: https://linkstack.org/instances/.

• Create a free site at neocities, but you need to understand some HTML.

• Create a full website or blog and go as big as you want: You are lucky if you know someone hosting a server and willing to host your site. You can easily rent a VPS (virtual private server) from a company such as Hetzner, Digital Ocean, or many others. You can also own a small single board computer at your house and use https://yunohost.org.

This page you create is visible to anybody on the internet who searches for it. So make your own choices of what you want to display publicly. Once people contact you through private channels, you can steer them to the preferred anonymous channels.

Step 3: Email

This is optional but highly recommended. If you own a domain(s), you can have an email address that is independent of whoever is hosting your mailbox. This prevents you from being locked into any mail provider and locked out of accounts such as your bank if your email provider goes down or kicks you off. I also recommend using private email services which means that nobody but you can read your inbox. Advertising supported email services rely on others reading your email to serve you personalized ads.

• Proton, Fastmail, and Tutanota are some of the providers of private email that allow you to use your own domain.

Email Aliasing

Do not give companies your real email address if you can avoid it. You can use an email aliasing solution from your mail provider, Simplelogin, or Anonaddy. You can also buy a domain and create a catch all forward. Njal.la is good for anonymous domains. These all forward to your mailbox but don't reveal your real identity to those companies and data brokers. Ideally give every company a different email alias to protect yourself from spam, breaches, and data brokers.

Gradually replace your @adtechcompany.com email address with either aliases for subscriptions/purchases or your @yourname.com email address for important accounts like banking and your friends and family.

Step 4: Share your domain with people

Whenever you want to share contacts with someone, simply give them your domain/site name. Because the page contains all the ways you want them to reach you, it is all they need store in their address book. You can change the content of this page and the ways to contact you any time you want without the need for them to update anything. You can easily generate a QR code for your site and save it on your phone for people you meet in person.